How To Start a Jewelry Business Online From Home (Step by Step Guide)

You are incredibly creative and can create beautiful jewelry. Now, you have an urge to apply your creative instinct to make jewelry commercially and turn this passion into a great revenue-earning venture.

You are likely full of ambition and you have countless questions, such as:

• Which items should your online jewelry business start with, rings, bracelets, earrings, anklets, or everything?
• Should you design it yourself or get it from a manufacturer?
• How can you open an online store?
• Or perhaps the most common question beginners with limited starting budgets ask is, “how to start a jewelry business at home?”

Worry not. You’re in good hands!

After reading this article, you will be able to build a fully operational jewelry store and be able to begin selling your creations to the world.

Statista predicts the global jewelry industry is expected to reach $307 billion by 2026.

Sound encouraging?

Let’s begin with our step by step guide.

Step 1: Make a business plan

Whether you plan to establish a small jewelry business or build a mega online store, a well thought jewelry business plan can keep you ahead of competitors.

In addition, it is important to register your business as an LLC to protect your business from liability and to obtain tax benefits. If you choose the best state to form an LLC, you can further enhance these benefits and ensure a smoother registration process. Planning now is better than waiting for failure to reveal its causes.

It’s better to spend some time now than trying to discover the causes of failure later.

1.1 Market research

It’s imperative to conduct thorough market research. It will save you a lot of time and effort that you can spend on your business.

As an initial step, you can read blogs and join forums and relevant social media groups to build your understanding of the industry.

Create a list of pointers, gradually fill it with more queries, and keep looking for the answers. Eventually, your research will evolve into a goldmine of data.

Your initial findings can include:

• Market trends
• Existing product lines
• Spending volume of potential customers
• Average and total sales in a specific period
• Customer pain points
• Current products and quality issues
• Strengths and weaknesses of your competitors

As you dig deep, you will come across several other queries on your way.

At this stage, you will probably find Google trends a very helpful free market research tool.

The image below shows how the earrings search has performed over the last 5 years in the USA. It peaks every holiday season in December.

That means demand for earrings rises tremendously in the days leading up to the holiday season.

This single screenshot tells something valuable for someone who wants to start with the earrings business.

You can find a lot more information about the industry, demand and related queries to expand your search as you move ahead.

If you are looking to target the US market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the US Census Bureau (UCB) can also help you in your market research.

The screenshot below shows a number of relevant links against the term jewelry on the BLS site.

1.2 Define your niche

After exploring the market potential, it’s time to figure out which niche best suits you.

Knowing about your potential customers will help you develop a solid business plan.

Do you want your online jewelry business to cater to everything people like to wear, or are you more focused on building a business around something more specific?

Do you have a specialization? Do you create specific jewelry? Broches? Rings? Bracelets? If so, there’s your niche.

If you’re more of a generalist, you may have to narrow your focus, at least to begin with.

How about only dealing in diamond wedding rings? It appears to be a small audience, but this can help you fully satisfy a targeted niche.

Whether you want to design yourself or buy from a supplier, most of us would be tempted to target every customer out there with everything they ever wanted to chase huge revenues.

That does sound tempting, but if you are starting with a small budget, trying to satisfy everyone isn’t going to work.

Knowing the audience size and demographics will help finalize your niche.

Use data and research to guide you to figure out what to design and sell within a particular market in order to make a reasonable profit.

1.3 Who will make the jewelry?

You may have been designing your own jewelry for a while, but doing it on a large scale while meeting market standards can require a big budget, high precision, quality and commitment.

You can take classes or courses to perfect the skill or hire a designer if you think you won’t have time to do everything yourself.

If that doesn’t fit your plan, find a reputed manufacturer to buy items from. You can also consider reaching out to a wholesaler or a supplier in the local or international market.

Aliexpress, Alibaba, Fashion Bella, and Azeera are a few options.

If you use suppliers, you will typically need to buy jewelry pieces in bulk to get a reasonable price.

You can also think about the dropshipping model if you don’t have the money for large orders.

The drop shipping model will give you less control over product quality but can provide enough product to satisfy projected demand.

1.4 Prioritize budgeting

Budgeting is crucial when creating a business plan. You should be very clear if your startup needs external funding or if you have the cash available to support the business.

Your budget will vary depending on the niche and the type of jewelry you want to deal in, such as gold, diamond, bronze, or glass.

You can simplify this process by noting down the following:

• If you want to design jewelry yourself, will you need extra tools and equipment?
• Even if you like to deal with a supplier, you may need capital to maintain inventory.
• Do you plan to start the business alone from home, or does it require a team, a coworking space, and other general recurring overheads?
• You may need some licenses and permits, so don’t forget to include this cost.
• There will be a marketing cost as well.

Budgeting is a key requirement for any business, no matter how modest. The more you know about costs, the better you can plan for the future.

Step 2: Name your business

It’s time to name your business. Take your time and try to be creative.

If you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll already have a name in mind. If you’re not, you have some work to do!

Your business name should resonate well with your audience and reflect the activity you want to carry out.

It will be the face of your company, so it should be short, unique, and easy to pronounce.

You also need to make sure whatever name you pick should be available to use legally and not already in use or protected.

Since you plan to create an online jewelry business, you not only need to come up with a name that works, but the domain name must be available too.

Given that most of the good names are already taken, that’s quite the challenge!

Once you are done with the brainstorming, get your desired name registered and secure the domain before someone else takes it.

We’ll talk more about domain names in a minute.

Step 3: Create an online jewelry store with WordPress

This section will make it easy for you to start a store from scratch. You will need WordPress and a jewelry theme that integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce.

If you haven’t been involved in designing websites before, fear not. We will make it as easy as possible.

There are several solutions for building online stores, including paid and free options. We have found WordPress to be the best solution, which is why we use it.

It’s free, easy to use and provides full control over your website.

3.1 Get a domain

You have made a business plan and finalized a name for your online business. It’s time to get the domain name registered before someone else does.

If you are unfamiliar with domain names, they are what you type in the web browser to open a website.

For example, to Google something, you enter www.google.com in your web browser to open the search engine homepage.

If you want to read about in great length on this topic, we have an in-depth tutorial on domain names.

There is a small fee you pay to a domain registrar that usually falls between $5 – $20 per year.

You can buy the domain from NameCheap, Google domains or Domain.com.

3.2 Buy hosting

Once the domain is registered, it’s time to buy web hosting.

Web hosting is where you store your website so it is accessible on the web. You pay annually for hosting like you do for your domain name. In fact, you can buy both from the same provider for a single fee.

You can choose any hosting company you like. There are plenty of them, such as SiteGround, Cloudways, or Hostinger.

Each can provide dedicated WordPress hosting plans that are suitable for your online jewelry business.

For example, Hostinger offers a free domain name for the first year.

They also have an easy WordPress installation process that anyone can use regardless of experience level.

3.3 Install WordPress

After buying the hosting plan, you need to install WordPress on your domain.

Inside the Hostinger dashboard, you should find the WordPress Auto Installer tool to assist you through the process.

With this tool, you can install WordPress in under a minute.

Soon as you are done with WordPress installation, you will get a default homepage and dashboard similar to the image below.

WordPress is a powerful yet easily manageable content management system (CMS) that delivers the options you need to build a store.

There are hundreds of popular themes and plugins you can install on your website to transform it into anything you want.

3.4 Install Astra and WooCommerce

For this article, we will pick the cream of the crop combination, Astra and WooCommerce.

Astra is a free WordPress theme and one of the best multipurpose WordPress themes around, with over 1.7 million installations. It integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, the best eCommerce plugin for WordPress.

Astra comes with prebuilt Starter Templates, including some captivating premium jewelry store layouts.

To install Astra from the WordPress repository, you first need to access theWordPress admin area.

Do that by typing in www.yoursite.com/wp-login.php and entering the username and password you created when setting everything up.

From the sidebar menu, go to Appearance > Themes and press the Add New button.

Type Astra in the search box to locate it. Install and Activate the theme.

Astra offers hundreds of predesigned templates you can import from the Starter Templates library. Each template packs essential pages for your website that avoid the hassle of designing and creating them.

Let’s import a template from the library.

3.5 Import a predesigned Astra template

Astra includes over 230 professionally designed templates that are fully functioning websites. They are the easiest way to build an online store.

Go to Appearance > Astra Options.

Install the Astra Importer Plugin that you will find in the right panel. It will activate itself and take you to the next screen.

Press the blue color button “Build Your Website Now.”

Note:

You can also install the Astra Starter Template plugin from the WordPress repository. For this, go to Plugins > Add New and enter Starter Template in the search box.

Astra is compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, and Beaver page builders. You can select any of them on the next screen, and the library will show relevant templates.

The next screen will display Astra’s Starter Templates library. You can scroll down to find your desired template or use the search box to save time.

You can also select a different page builder later from the top right corner of the library page.

Note:

Astra also offers beautifully designed jewelry store templates with Elementor page builder. They are premium templates that are a part of the Astra Pro version.

I recommend buying a premium template that offers tons of valuable features that are helpful for your online business.

You can see in the screenshot below that your jewelry store is ready soon as you import it to your website.

We will continue with the Block Editor (Gutenberg) and select the Cosmetics Store Starter Template.

Just click on it, and the import wizard will assist you through the entire process.

You can upload a custom logo and change the color scheme and website fonts when you import.

The final step will ask for some essential information. Enter your name, email, and the rest of the data so Astra can import relevant content for your site.

Once you start the process, you will notice it preparing all essential plugins, including WooCommerce, forms and pages that you otherwise need to do manually. Astra makes it all effortless for you.

Click on View Your Website after the process is complete. It should take less than a minute.

There you go. You have created a professionally designed eCommerce store without spending a dollar on website development!

3.6 Familiarize yourself with WordPress plugins

You can browse your new website through the top menu. You should find the Home, Shop, Testimonial, About, and Contact pages the import process has created for you.

They are all essential components for an online jewelry business.

You can effortlessly replace images, product names, and descriptions with jewelry-related content. We will return to it in a few minutes.

First, we should go inside the WordPress admin area to explore some newly added features.

You can notice Astra added WooCommerce, Products, Analysis, Marketing, and WebForms pages while it imported the template.

Besides the WooCommerce plugin, Astra installed Checkout Plugins, Variation Swatches and Spectra. All three of them enhance the user experience on your website.

We will shortly discuss Checkout and Variation Swatches in detail.

For now, let’s appreciate how effortlessly Astra performed a complex task and upgraded our website!

3.7 Edit pages

The default pages are great, but they may not include everything you want to include. Let’s edit them so they fit your needs perfectly.

Go to Pages > All Pages and navigate to Home.

Click on the Edit button to open the WordPress editor for this page.

Click on the image you need to replace. It will show relevant tools in the right sidebar panel. Tap the Style tab to find the option to replace/remove the hero image.

You can upload your own image or use a high-resolution free image from Pixabay, which integrates nicely with Astra.

You can repeat the process for other images on predesigned pages to make it look like the jewelry store you want.

Next, you should add a new product. You can also edit the existing one. We recommend editing a few and adding new products to learn more about what your jewelry store can do with the free modules.

3.8 Add a product

A store isn’t a store without products. Let’s add one now.

To add a new product, go to Products > Add New.

When the WordPress editor opens, enter the name of the jewelry item and the feature image. You can also enter a description in the editor part.

Choose a relevant category, add the price and press the publish button.

You can do a lot more with products in the editing mode, such as offering discounts, setting variables, or inventory limits. But we want to simply add it for our tutorial.

You can browse to the shop page where you can see products giving a standard eCommerce look for an online jewelry business.

Now that you have those jewelry items on your shop page, what next?

You will need a payment processing tool to carry out transactions on your site. Your customers should be able to pay easily, which is a surefire way of increasing your profit.

3.9 Add payment system: Checkout Plugins – Stripe for WooCommerce

Among many solutions that WooCommerce supports through different plugins, Checkout Plugins – Stripe for WooCommerce is the easiest method to accept payments through cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Without a payment method added to your website, your cart will look like the following screenshot on the checkout page.

If there is no way a payment can be processed, your users will leave the site immediately.

Fortunately, we already have the Stripe for WooCommerce installed, which came as part of the Astra Starter Template plugin installation.

Let’s configure the plugin and enable the payment gateway on our jewelry store.

Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins and click on Settings under the plugin title “Checkout Plugins – Stripe for WooCommerce.”

It will take you to the payments tab of the WooCommerce plugin, where you need to click on the blue Connect with Stripe button.

Getting started with Stripe is easy. The step by step wizard is a simple way to create an account and proceed with the verification process.

Once your account is created, you will see populated payment fields inside the WooCommerce payment tab.

On the product page, customers can now see an active payment option with the button Pay via Stripe.

With the payment gateway active, you can also limit the cards to accept payment.

Go to WooCommerce > Setting > Payments > Credit Cards and choose the cards you want to accept in your online store.

3.10 Variations: Variation Swatches for WooCommerce

By default, WooCommerce provides the dropdown field for product variations where users can select different sizes, colors, or anything you set.

Though it does the job, it is far from impressive and not particularly user-friendly, especially on small mobile screens.

Users like easy interactions. They would love to stay and buy if the options are visible and easy to read on any screen size.

The Variation Swatches for WooCommerce plugin allows you to customize how your product variations appear on the product page.

When Variation Swatches for WooCommerce get activated, it expands the WooCommerce menu. It adds several customization options you can use to change how variations appear on the product page.

The below image shows how you can see a visible difference only after activating the plugin. You can enhance the user experience with a value change on the setting page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Starting an online jewelry business

Jewelry designing and selling is a great way to share your artistic and entrepreneurial skills with the world. You can create impressive designs and showcase them on your online store.

Whatever jewelry product line you want to start with, it’s essential to develop a solid business plan before setting up your store. Every business needs a firm foundation and a plan forms a key part of that.

You can follow this in-depth tutorial and begin your business journey with confidence!

Do you run a business? Have any tips you’d like to share? Please don’t forget to share your experience with us in the comments section.